"I’ll be the first to admit that I love getting a good deal and I’m all about the free stuff. But we need to pay our respects to the companies that provide us with the freebies.

I think back to one of my favorite books as a little girl, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. In the book, the little boy always takes from the tree, never giving anything in return, until finally the boy cuts down the tree in order to make a sailboat, and the tree has nothing left to give. Some say that this book is a story about selfless love, but in this sense we are the little boy who continually takes [freebies] and never gives anything in return [purchases]. Eventually, our giving trees [the companies and individuals which provide us with the 'free' stuff] will be merely treestumps, and we’ll be sitting beside those stumps wondering what happened.

Let’s not take too much advantage – support those businesses and people who support you with the freebies, or else they won’t be around for long."

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